The 'Mastered For iTunes' Deception

New Rising Media writes "People speak of not noticing the difference in audio between music downloads and physical copies, whereas chances are they have. In a crystallising moment, there will always be that tiny split-second noise of digitisation, or the compromised sound-levellings of an alternate bit rate, courtesy of an encoder. It's that unavoidable glitch in the song that you can't un-hear when it is heard, and builds a somewhat undefinable character around the song.

Whether this is a character of enjoyment or disappointment around this realisation is up to the listener's psyche; but Apple has had the intention of resolving this issue with their 'Mastered for iTunes' guidelines: Music as the Artist and Sound Engineer intended."